El mar imaginat

El Mar Imaginat (The Imagined Sea).

 

The notion of composing a piece that used the landscape as poetic material came to me upon reading certain texts by French philosopher Gaston Bachelard. In various works he explains that matter bears huge scope for producing images, and that it can be treated as a format for enabling poetic or musical creations to carry material essence, thereby establishing a relationship between matter and the poetic image. The fundamental material component I have worked on in this piece is the sea, as the title suggests.

The piece incorporates excerpts 1 and 10 of Le Cimetière Marin by Paul Valéry. The first movement reflects the stillness of the sea, its depth and the sweltering sun that lends it a distinguishing colour. The instrumentation of this movement is formed by a dense, compact fabric on strings with certain themes that emerge repeatedly in order to lend the ensemble coherence; the percussion and wind instruments are used several times like swift, abrupt motifs in order to give contrast to the string presentations. Accordingly, in the first movement I sought to endow the piece with colour and an interplay of tension to reflect what the poet is suggesting. The second movement is less stable and fuses various themes; although the first landscape is more observed rather than embraced, in the second the text deals with various components of the landscape: the sea, the midday sun, the graveyard, etc., and it uses them as inner meditation. In this movement, at certain points the orchestra is regarded as an interplay between soloists and the general ensemble; the variations of colour and tempo strive to depict a text imbued with light, even though at the end we see the resurgence of the theme of the deep sea and the graveyard, components that define the landscape of Sète, the place where Paul Valéry created Le Cimetière Marin.

Jesús Rodríguez Picó